Words and Works from a Seattle Author

Let’s be Bad Guys

I’m still only at about 80% on the health scale–this head cold is a brute–but there’s a definite upward trend, so I figure I can manage one post this week. A dozen topics have risen to the top, only to slip from my focus, except for one. Luckily, it’s a writing topic, so I can indulge myself.

I think it’s fair to say that my writing has evolved over the years. Some of this evolution has been instinctual, which is to be expected from an autodidact like me. Just as I sometimes know that something works without knowing why it works, so do I just sometimes know that something works better without knowing why. Much of the time, though, I am cognizant of the changes in my writing, as they are the result of a conscious shift. Perhaps I’m correcting a bad habit (e.g., an over-reliance on the Rule of Three), or maybe I’m shifting away from one method or style in favor of another.

But then there are the times when a change has been so subtle that I don’t notice it at all. Such is the case with how I deal with antagonists.

I’ve written about Bad Guys before (here, and here), describing how I approach them as characters, but the other day, as I sat on the couch in a NyQuil-induced haze and binged on Lilyhammer, I began to look back over the bad guys in my books and stories.

My early work has definite antagonists: classic villains who set up shop across the street from my protagonist and duke it out like Macy and Gimble. My villains were easy to understand, with clear motivations and relatively uncomplicated relationships with the protagonist. I experimented with ambiguity a bit, but not much.

Then, around FC:III, they began to change. In the middle of the Fallen Cloud Saga, I started to have two classes of antagonists: short-term bad guys of the standard straightforward mold, and longer term bad guys (e.g., Custer and Vincent and Alejandro) who themselves change during the course of the tale. These “attenuated” antagonists had more staying power because they could adapt to changes in the story line.

More recently, in Unraveling Time, my bad guys were rarely even perceived, much less seen on stage. Like black holes, they were noticed primarily by the effect they had on the other characters, and they carried no scenes on their own. This gave rise to a much more character-driven plot which was a conscious goal.

Now, with my most recent work, I’ve taken the next step. It hit me as I sat there watching Stevie Van Zandt’s mobster persona negotiate the minefield of “cultural differences” in the Norwegian hinterlands: my last short story and the novel I’m working on have no bad guys at all.

That’s right. No antagonist. None.

In the back of my brain, I heard Mr. Roberts, my high school AP English teacher, say, “Are you mad? You must have an antagonist! Who else shall challenge your thesis?”

Shut up, you old blowhard.

Sure, bad guys make for excitement and action and life-and-death situations, but they’re not a requirement for drama. Most works of fiction have clear-cut bad guys. From our police procedurals to our courtroom dramas to our doctor shows to our current obsession with zombies and superheroes, they all have bad guys. Even in works of greater moral ambiguity (like Lilyhammer), where bad guys run the show and classic protagonists are thin on the ground, we still have guys who we recognize as antagonists because they take bad to a whole new level.

But how often have we said of someone, “He’s his own worst enemy”? How often have we seen the choices people make–sometimes making the same choice over and over again–wreak havoc in their lives? On the flip side, how many of us have a nemesis? How many people in the world have one person with whom they must contend at every turn, even for a short period?

This novel I’m writing is about real, everyday people, who have real, everyday issues of love and loyalty and sickness and death.

All that is needed is to write relatives into the story: the protagonist has a sibling, a cousin, an in-law, a spouse! No other “bad guys” needed! And I forgot what the Rule of Three is, found it on AmyRaby.com

The issue, at least as I see it, is what story you are telling, and why you feel the need to tell it. Personally, I find most real people’s lives quite boring. Sure we all have our own stories, we deal with the challenges life presents us each in our own way, but does that make the story interesting or worth telling? If there isn’t a new lesson to be learned, and there probably isn’t in most people’s lives, why tell the story? Yes, there are masters who can craft beautiful descriptions and use adjectives perfectly, but where’s the story? Does that story do something to me? Does is stretch or redefine my reality? I read or watch movies to learn something new or to escape the humdrum banality of work/banks/home/taxes (be entertained, in other words). I want to identify with a protagonist who is ‘more’ than me – whether in his abilities or in the challenges he faces. Even if he fails, there needs to be something with which I identify.
UNLESS – now we get to why you are writing – unless you are writing for you and not for me, and, by extension, why I should want to read what you write.

If you, the writer, are writing because, as all real writers, you have to, cool.

But if you want to publish what you write, now I come into the picture. If you publish, you want me to read what you have written. You want me to appreciate your labors, you want me learn from your insights and observations, you want me to identify or have some kind of relationship with your characters, and, I hope, you want me to enjoy the experience.
So,if you are going to ask me to spend my time and money on the experience you are offering me, what are you bringing to the table? Here are my requirements: I want to read a well crafted work, I want to see or feel things that expand my horizons, I want to learn something new, and I want to be able to see myself, even partially, somewhere in this environment you are showing me. I know vanilla, most of us live ‘vanilla’. I, personally, do not buy vanilla. But, just to totally ruin the ice cream metaphor, if you offer me peanut butter and cheddar cheese ice cream with chili ginger crunch, I will be first in line.

I live a real everyday life. It is mostly boring. If you wrote about my life, there would be hundreds of blank pages with a few paragraphs spotted here and there throughout. Why on earth would any reader waste his/her hard earned money on hundreds of blank pages?

Just some thoughts

Feel better my friend. When I get what you have, my hand moves to Scotland, Ireland or Lynchburg Tennessee and I find myself talking with one of the Glen brothers, Old Man Bushmill or my old friend Black Jack

Unfortunately (or fortunately, take your pick), there is no one “Reader” whose tastes and literary appetites dictate what will sell in the marketplace. Hell, _I’m_ not monolithic in my reading tastes. Sometimes I want fluff. Sometimes I want to escape. Sometimes the characters are enough to intrigue me. I don’t always want a cold-blue-steel hero who always performs at peak capacity. You don’t either, I’ll wager, and luckily, neither does the reading public at large.

If we sifted through your life, I will bet you that five shekels you owe me that we could find a couple events that would make a readable story. Any time _you_ learned something about life, that has the potential for a narrative that someone else–someone who hasn’t learned that lesson–might enjoy reading about. Now, would it be as exciting and action-packed as a thriller or a sci-fi epic? No, it wouldn’t, but that’s okay because not every novel has to be action-packed.

It still has to be _interesting_, of course, and well-written, too. But while most of our everyday lives are the literary equivalent of those blank pages you speak of, we’ve all had moments of drama, change, conflict, revelation, epiphany, success, failure, love, and grief. Now, does anyone want to read a story of me when I was five and came home to find out that my mother had died? Probably not. But what if the story was about my father? Or about our family, and what happened before and after that day. Yeah…someone might find that an interesting story.

And, since I write fiction and not memoir, I can jazz things up a bit.

Of course, NONE of this means we have to have an antagonist. Some story types do better with an antagonist–who is James Bond without a nemesis? Just a guy with cool gadgets and a way with women.–but it’s not a requirement. And some stories, in my opinion, do better _without_ an antagonist.

As for your NyQuil substitutes, this head cold effectively rendered my nose and tongue insensate. I’d have a hard time telling the difference between Lagavulin and a cherry coke, so I’m not going to crack a $90 bottle when I’m in that condition!
–k